Mutual insurance concept brief
Mutual Insurance Concept paper
By John Steven Bianucci and Kevin Jones
**********MICIN (“My Kin”) v2*******************
Solving Systemic Risk: As if We are All Relations
Unprecedented environmental and social crises, with increasing energy in a multitude of systems (climatic, environmental degradation, refugee) means systemic risk has never been higher and that increased risk levels are a certain part of the landscape for decades and perhaps centuries to come.
MICIN (“My Kin”) Mutual Insurance Company is a transformative, harmonizing force. MICIN attracts and magnifies positive Anthropocenic energies, connecting billions in open-source, regenerative relationships through a mutual insurance company (MICIN) embedded by and within regenerative global communities, empowering both individual and socially cohesive innovation and evolution.
The first mutual insurance company was set up by Benjamin Franklin after a fire burned down his printing shop and a couple of blocks of businesses in Philadelphia. Franklin’s innovative idea was that they should pool their money, paying regular insurance premiums to reduce the risk and cost of future fires. A mutual insurance company lets a community pool and share its risk to reduce future costs. A mutual insurance company is a kind of cooperative, and Franklin’s mutual insurance company was the first coop on this continent. Franklin invented the lightning rod and people paid premiums to have them installed on their roofs in order to reduce the chance of fire caused by lightning. Preventative actions like lightning rods and fire hazard audits of each building cost much less than the disastrous cost of fire.
Worldwide, webs of regeneration communities form (Capital Institute’s Regenerative Communities); gather at Conferences (Transform Earth/Oceans by GatherLabs; ReGenerate Illinois Summit; Maasai; Perennial Farm Gathering), and other connective venues throughout the year — increasing social resilience and community collective intelligence.
People join because MICIN reduces all of our risks and cuts costs. It also means evaluating real assets, social, financial, and environmental in every neighborhood in a city or every rural supervisor district in a county, as well as risks to create a resilient, stable local economic bioregion.
SOCAP and Neighborhood Economics and now GatherLabs co founder Kevin Jones and John Steven Bianucci, a lead partner at ReGenerate Illinois and director of impact for Iroquois Valley, are working on another version of mutual insurance for climate smart farmers converting to regenerative agriculture in the ReGenerate Illinois group to cover the loss of income for the three years it takes to transition from industrial agriculture to Organic and regenerative farming that creates newly deepening and healthy top soil, sequestering carbon and paying for itself with the help of the Organic premium. Community members support farmers through their transition by purchasing insurance products sensitive to and accounting for reductions in ‘externalities’ while rewarding ecology resilience generation and heathy food production. For example, community members may pay more in those first three years, helping subsidize the farmers, in exchange for the lower health-care costs known to be incurred by those consuming diverse, toxic-free, locally-based diets.
Neighborhood Economics network of system entrepreneurs is an instance of collaborative, regenerative networking and a mutual insurance product line growing out of it is a collateral fund acting as the loan loss reserve for defaulted loans within the system entrepreneur network, The money raised to make the investors whole (the loan-loss reserve), could be applied to pay for the system entrepreneur and related mentors, along with other capacities as soon as it is raised, to de-risk the accelerator’s pipeline. Meanwhile, lessons learned and collective intelligence embedded in the network is shared, wherein intelligence increases in value as it is shared and related to, across the network of constituents, each incentivized to enhance its value, thus lowering the cost of insuring individuals, families, and businesses across the entire suite of insurability.
Another example in our innovative mutual insurance product line, this one serving urban markets, is inspired by the Jubilee, the elimination of debt of the poor. Mandated in the Bible as a path to justice for all, Peter Block wants to hold a major commemoration in Cincinnati focused on jubilee next year, which marks 400th years since the first slaves were brought into North America. People with crippling toxic debt cost the city more in social service costs, policing costs, lower city-wide property values, reducing overall economic development potential, increase the cost of hospitals and health care for all. Toxic debt, debt that keeps a single mom from having a family doctor, means her teenage son may have to go to the emergency room or urgent care clinic in case of an allergy attack. Because he doesn’t have the right medicine to keep it under control, a $10,000, or more, hospital visit results. Credit card debt, which grows because the single mom can’t make ends meet, keeps her daughter from being able to take part in after school programs for the gifted because she can’t afford to miss the free school bus.
Holistic analysis by a social service agency or non profit can document and quantify what such costs are to the whole city of Cincinnati, or just pick one neighborhood, say Mount Adams, the most affluent neighborhood in the city. Then you can create a mutual insurance product to enable the rich folks in Mount Adams to reduce the cost of the West End’s debt that adds to their taxes, their social service cost, their policing costs, the cost to local hospitals, etc. Paying off that single mom’s predatory toxic credit card debt cuts taxes for the rich. So Mount Adams and people in the West End would be pooling their resources to eliminate the burden of predatory credit card debt in the West End and reducing their taxes while doing it.
